Shopping in Seoul

Why I cannot make this thing attach photos in a predictable fashion, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. Sorry if the funny layout makes you seasick. I wish it would at least add them in the order I asked for, instead of altering them at random, including putting some on top of each other. Technology is for geeks.

Today I went with some friends to market in Seoul. I didn't really mean to shop the whole day, but I actually did a lot more gawking at the scenery than shopping, and so I count it a cultural experience all around. The picture at the end of the line that's supposed to be at the beginning is of Dave, who is from Canada. Calgary, I believe, is where most of our Canadians are from (all from the same school there, a sister school to Ajou). Dave has a son and at least one daughter-- I've lost count of them between stories, but that's my current knowledge of his family--and his wife and son are coming to visit at the end of the summer term. Dave is one of the few people here that properly appreciates our museum trips, so I like him very much. Plus, he speaks some Korean because he lived here for two years twelve years ago, so he was very useful wandering around in the stores. In the middle of the row of pictures are Adam and Anna. Anna you already saw in the fortress wall pictures. Adam is also from Calgary, and is not quite as interesting as Dave because he's not an old geezer of 34 yet and has no children, but he's good fun. Then are Wendy and Cindy, in that order. They are sisters from Utah. Wendy goes to Utah State, I think, and Cindy goes to Brigham-Young. They are extremely nice people, plus as a bonus, Wendy is an international studies major and speaks Swedish. And that is with whom I went to market.

We did, in fact, literally go to market today. All six of us took a bus to Suwon station and then the subway/ regular train to Seoul. The subway acts a lot like a subway in that you use it exactly like a subway and you get on it underground, but almost all of the trip is above ground where you can see what's going past, which is kind of neat. They call it KoRail, and it goes to different cities all over the country like an Amtrak line, but it gets overcrowded so a lot of people stand like on subways. Yes, I stood the whole way from Suwon to Seoul. There's a picture of the above-ground tracks up there that I took while we were waiting on a platform to transfer lines. When you get to a subway station that serves more than one line here, the subway plays a few measures of Vivaldi AND plays a birdcall to tell you the transfer is coming, which was weird but effective and helpful. A nice thing about using public transportation here is that I can charge my student ID with money and use that as a pass for all bus and subway rides. The ID card has a magnetic strip on it that holds that information, so I just have to wave my wallet at a machine on the way into the bus and it deducts the fare from my balance, with a student discount. Bus rides are cheaper here than at home (at least cheaper than in D.C. I can't speak for places like Johnson City because public transportation is just about mythical there), about 85 cents, 80 with the student discount. I'm not sure how the subway/train rate compares because when I've done a lot of subwaying on trips in the states, I've either not paid attention and just let the chaperones tell me what to do, or bought an all-day pass that just lets you ride without telling you how much it would normally count. It was about 1.40 to go from Suwon to Seoul.

We went to the Nam Dae Mun market together. This was a big old marketplace that caters to tourists a lot, so it had many many booths of souvenir-looking keychains, purses and carry-on suitcases, inexpensive tshirts, soccer jerseys, that kind of thing. Like everything in urban Korea, the environment was visually complex enough to make you dizzy after a while. I thought I was pretty good at handling a lot of visual stimulation after getting good at shelving books and clearing stacks at Sherrod, but after a couple of hours in this market, I was plumb worn out from just looking at stuff. Every square inch of space was filled with piles and piles of goods for sale, including people that might take their baskets of vegetables and just sit down in the middle of the narrow street to hawk them. There is one picture of the market above. The vendors do not like to have their booths photographed, so this general picture is the only one I took of the marketplace. Markets here are places in which you're supposed to bargain for prices on things. I bought two things there, but they were both marked fairly cheaply already and I felt weird about arguing over prices in a language the sellers didn't understand, so I didn't mess with bargaining any. We reckoned we might split up while wandering the stalls, so we agreed to meet at the gate where we entered, Gate 6 pictured above, at 1:00 for lunch. The guys immediately split off from us, and after a few minutes Cindy wanted to walk faster so she split off too, and Wendy and Anna and I walked around together.

I had set everyone to look out for teddy bears for me, because Andy's mom collects them and I'll try to bring her one if I can find it. (Teddy bears are elusive here.) After maybe 45 minutes of wandering, Cindy caught up with my little group and told me that inside a pair of doors to my right and upstairs there, there were some teddy bears I might want to look at, and since I hadn't seen a single one since arriving in the country, I said sure I'd like to go see them. Cindy disappeared again, and Wendy and Anna said they'd wait outside, so I went in by myself to look for the alleged bears. I was trying to look very quickly, since the other girls were waiting on me, so I sort of rushed through three floors of the place looking around for teddy bears. Seeing none, I decided to give up that idea. The place turned out to be huge, a massive catacomb of tourist shop booths, and I could have gotten lost in that place for hours while Wendy and Anna waited, so I went back downstairs to leave. Except then I discovered that with the hurried trip through the massively complicated environment, I had no idea where the door was through which I'd entered. No problem, right? I'd just go out the first door I came to and catch up with them a block down the road. Except then I found that I couldn't find any door at all. I was totally and completely turned around, both by the fact that most of the complicated booths look exactly the same, selling the same stuff, and the fact that a lot of aisles and alleys and areas in Korea are cluttered up such that in the US you'd think you weren't supposed to walk there, so I'd made some turns in the store to avoid going through those places. I couldn't ask directions because a) I don't speak the language and b) other than "somewhere down from gate 6," I wouldn't have been able to say anything useful about where I'd come from and wanted to return to. So I wandered as quickly as I could, looking for a door, any door. Finally I found an exit sign, but it definitely didn't lead anywhere but to something like a loading dock. I felt again like I wasn't supposed to be walking there, so I went back in and wandered some more. I was worried at this point that Wendy and Anna might have given up waiting on me and decided just to meet me at the appointed lunch hour, so I was trying to go as fast as I could, and eventually I found another exit sign. This one, too, put me out on something that looked an awful lot like a loading area with service entrances, but this time I decided just to climb out quickly and plead dumb American if anybody didn't like it. Nobody didn't like it, and it was fine, but when I got back to the street, I had no idea where I was. It was not a block or two away from my original entrance like I'd hoped, and I had no idea how much area the catacomb mall thing covered, so I didn't know how far I could possibly be. So I made my way all the way to the edge of the market, almost out into the city, and found a Gate 5 sign. I picked a direction to try to walk to Gate 6 from there. A Gate 4 sign soon notified me that I'd chosen wrong, so I turned around and got back to Gate 6, retraced the morning's steps, and eventually found the place at which I'd entered the confusing place. Alas, Wendy and Anna were not there. I wandered on my own for a few minutes thinking I'd just do that and meet them for the lunch hour, but I didn't really like being by myself, so when they found me again after some lonely wandering, I was quite pleased. We walked together till lunchtime, and after a while picked up Dave too.

The six of us got back together for lunch and ate in a little Korea restaurant. I had beef rib soup, yum. It would have been interesting and cheap to lunch on foods from street vendors in the market instead of a restaurant, but we'd all stood the entire way from Suwon and then walked around for a long time, and we wanted to sit. There was no room to sit near the street vendors, since benches would consume valuable inches that ought to be used for soccer jersey sales, and so we elected to try the restaurant. (Across the street from the restaurant was the wild fruit-tree-sculpture pictured above. I don't know what it was, but it was interesting.) Cindy had become unenthused with the market fairly quickly and did not want to shop anymore, so she and Wendy split off for the rest of the day and went to a palace. I was of course pretty tempted by the palace, but I've seen several old structures here and only one market (except for the fish market in Busan, but that was all fish and not the same at all), so I decided to go with Dave, Anna, and Adam to Dong Dae Mun market, a little ways away from Nam Dae Mun. Dong Dae Mun is not geared for tourists like Nam Dae Mun, and it was interesting to compare them. I am glad I went to the second market, even though I really didn't need extra shopping time, because it was a lot more like real Korea for locals.

Instead of touristy stuff, Dong Dae Mun has all kinds of things that real people might really want to buy for everyday life. It is the biggest marketplace in Korea, covering every back alley and tunnel in a good-sized area of Seoul. Where Namdaemun's stalls alternated between key rings and purses, Dongdaemun's were organized largely by category, with a bunch of food places in a row, then a bunch of places selling stuff styled as US Army gear, then a bunch of seamstresses, a bunch of subzero sleeping bags, and so forth. We were tired still from the morning, so we decided we'd only take about an hour here. Adam went off by himself, because he really wanted to find some cheap brand-name-clone clothes to supplement the clothes he'd brought from home. I just wanted to watch Korea go by, mostly, so I decided to follow Dave around. Dave is good for following because he's taller than me and speaks some Korean. Anna followed me following Dave; she went really quiet for this segment of the day and the trip home, so I think she must have been really tired. Dave was looking hard for a good deal on a mink blanket, which I'd never heard of but Anna was familiar with it. She's from Wisconsin and he's from Canada, so it must be something people in cold countries truck with. We spent most of this time looking for Dave's blanket, which we never found because it turns out they only sell them in wintertime, but he found a really nice lady selling other kinds of blankets who's going to try to bring one in for him on monday.

Then we went home. There is a picture of a big ornate gate up there that looks just like the big ornate gate at the fortress wall in Suwon from last week. This gate was sitting near the entrance to the subway for the home trip. There was also a big gate like this near the other market. It seems, then, that there are big old city gates for most or all of the big old cities, even if maybe they don't have walls in place anymore. I never saw a fortress wall in Seoul, but I saw a couple of gates. I didn't see a gate in Busan when we were there on the field trip, but that doesn't mean there wasn't one. Busan is a port city instead of an inland city, so it might be that it never had a wall because it was too busy going fishing.

James asked me when I first got here about the poverty around Korea, and I told him I really hadn't seen it much, because I'd just been on campus and in the airport, and the people in those whereabouts were pretty much exactly like most people in Johnson City. I've seen more of it now, and I saw a good bit of it wandering around behind Dave in the second market today. That was probably the most educational and worthwhile thing about today's trip, was just seeing what the country looks like behind all the bright colors and rock bands on street corners. That's why I'm happy with having skipped the palace, though I might try to con somebody into going back to the palace with me. Most of the merchants selling blankets or tshirts seemed fairly well-off, but others probably have trouble putting food on the table. Small-time back-alley cooks, women working long hours in the hot sun sewing beads to cloths, elderly men and women with baskets of potatoes and heads of lettuce sitting in the middle of the street to try to sell them because they can't afford a booth. Several times, we saw men crawling through the streets pushing collection baskets in front of them, scooting on their chests on little rolling platforms a few inches above the ground, their legs dragging uselessly behind them wrapped in heavy rubber to protect them from the pavement. There are not any drunk homeless people hanging around, though, not in the back alleys or around the subway or anywhere. I don't know if that means the Koreans have ways of taking care of their people, or if they just keep them really well out of sight. I suspect the latter might be the case, but I don't know. One of the Korean students in the ISS program says that they have a big problem in the countryside with poor people lying across the road to try to committ suicide because they can't feed themselves or their families, but I've not seen anything like that personally. I'm not going to take any pictures of this side of things, so if you're reading along, just know that there's a backside to a lot of the scenes I do post for you.

You must really like me a lot to have read all the way to the end of that whole long thing. Extra points on your Sarah Fan Club log sheet. I like you too. :D